After washing, skin and hair often feel rough and brittle, particularly if they have already been damaged by environmental influences. Moreover, hair may also be damaged as a result of coloring or perming and can then, after washing, often be characterized by a dry strawlike feel.
Consequently, conditioners are often used in shampoo compositions which are intended to counteract these disadvantages. Shampoo compositions are therefore often found which comprise silicones as conditioners. However, these can irreversibly attach to the hair and thus for their part cause negative effects on the feel, in the worst case even lead to problems when coloring and perming hair.
Furthermore, oils and waxes are suitable as conditioning agents in these cosmetic preparations. However, these are by far not as marked in their effect as the aforementioned silicones. Moreover, as a result of using these conditioners, only cloudy formulations are possible, and these oils and waxes can in any case only be stabilized in small amounts in the preparations.
As a result of using alkoxylated surfactants, mostly alkyl ether sulfates, upon using the cosmetic compositions skin irritations may arise and, moreover, calls for “green cosmetics” which are free from alkoxylated compounds are increasing. For these limitations with regard to the surfactants, there has hitherto been no satisfactory solution for providing shampoos with a good conditioning performance.
The object of the present invention was therefore to provide cosmetic compositions, the conditioning performance of which corresponds to that of silicone-containing preparations, or at best even surpasses them, and which, while avoiding alkoxylated ingredients, have foaming properties which are at least equally as good as compositions based on alkoxylated ingredients.
Surprisingly, it has been found that a cosmetic preparation comprising (a) at least one surfactant selected from nonalkoxylated anionic, zwitterionic or amphoteric surfactants, (b) a microemulsion and (c) at least one cationic polymer achieves the object stated above.